Jump to content

Page:A history of Hungarian literature.djvu/90

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
76
HUNGARIAN LITERATURE

instructive allegory, and only written for the sake of the moral lesson to be drawn from it.

In the Winter Evenings (possibly after the Spanish) the members of a small gathering of friends are supposed to be telling stories to each other. One tale is about Mauritius, a powerful wizard and king, who flies with his daughter to a lonely island. It curiously resembles The Tempest.

Faludi's works may be divided into three groups. His translations of collections of sententiæ (Baltazar's work among them) form one group, and a second consists of translations of moral dialogues. The third is composed of his original works, songs which appeal to the heart, and are forcible in their simplicity, descriptions of scenes of nature, idylls written in more melodious language than that of any previous writer, one morality, and a collection of his own original sententiæ, or teachings, entitled The Godly Man.

Had Faludi been more extensively read, and his pure and refined language more carefully studied, it is possible that the great linguistic controversy which arose a few years after his death, the so-called Language Reform, might have taken a different turn.